On Flight

Real pain is catharsis, as if to say, I don’t want to go running, I want to have sex with you. Now if you’re to stay, you said, put your hands here.

But there are other rules. I have to taxi. I have to descend.

My friend was listening to an instructional Hendrix song, which meant the Hendrix guitar was playing real slow.

I could understand how it happened, the learning. And by understanding I mean I could see how she mimicked, and then how she knew.

I wanted to ask, How have you been more human than me?

That fuck you until I die notion needs to be reconsidered.

If when I clench my jaw a weather could emerge beyond muscle and bone, but still purely physical.

Or am I asking why people always call me “a good person.”

Am I asking why you called me sensitive.

I heard about a woman who gave herself a transfusion with horse blood, did it in front of people so others could watch her get sick. At its best, this is what I have done to myself. Actively speaking, I am sick and cannot leave the room.

Nausea? It’s from the Greek word for “ship,” their chariots of the sea.

I don’t know how to turn any of this off, this body, talking even about cannibalism today.

I can Google “famous persons with neurosis”—I see my throat’s so close to a fleet of vertebrae that I run a shot of liquor right past an impending war.

If you really want to talk history, then live in the angle of your kill. If you have too many keys, you’ll be constantly fumbling at doors.

Perhaps, there, in the shaking of keys, the sound of atoms in the body.

I would like to make you feel how you want to, I think.

I think I’m beginning to be able to feel age in bodies.

I push my hand through a box of grain to get my image of a torso right.

I don’t wish to find the other side, only to bury my hand. There is no other side.

What muscle is this music, I once asked, because I know we’re too marginalized to choose the heart.

There’s a marsh crane, slow and large and indifferent, looking down on me lying here, where I imagine myself, in a shallow, still water, amidst the impending danger of overexposure and other creatures, their bites.

I keep trying to buy a ticket to see you and the browser times out: Sorry, you took too long. Please search again.

I have hated the casual exit at the end of the library row.

I want to core into a cliff with brave ravenous machines I’ve built and expose bright layers of sedimentary time.

Here is the biting blade that prises open the purity of rock, the ability to open a line.

I watch light carefully in the closed window, like the shine is a herd inside the glass, to remember glass for the liquid it is, and to remember the sadness of how to break it where it stands, there in the pane.

When I touched you, it was like beetles were spilling out of the glass and over the chain-link fence; a blanket of light and multiplicity, you; atoms, you.

You have to forgive them for their austerity, whoever they are.

You have to forgive them for their inability to move.

You have to forgive them for their violence, learn to speak instead of the body’s capacities. Give a human body a musical instrument and watch her beat the hell out of it with much more intensity than a machine.

That a body can be absolutely satisfied, lost in its capacity to hit, to yell, to fuck. There is a god.

Given that, imagine a machine playing not quite metronomically, then sliding out of control without passion, and turn back to the moment of comparison.

And then we have to forgive ourselves for moving, in whatever way we’ve moved.